In Awe didn't begin as a course. It began by noticing who pregnancy resources forget.

People sometimes ask how In Awe began. The shortest answer is that I couldn't find what I needed during my own pregnancy. That answer is true. But it leaves out almost everything that matters.

For most of my adult life, one question quietly followed me: What helps people become more fully themselves? What helps them realize their own, unique potential?

Long before I became pregnant, before I imagined In Awe, I found myself returning to it over and over again.

That question followed me through childhood wounds, years of therapy, relationships that healed me and relationships that didn't, grief, forgiveness, mistakes I wished I hadn't made, and the long, ordinary work of trying to become someone I respected. Somewhere along the way I began asking another set of questions too: If each of us leaves an inheritance beyond money or possessions, what kind of inheritance do I hope to leave? And if I don't have obvious heirs, who would those people be?

I had grown up with questions much larger than I knew how to ask. Eventually those questions found their way into my classrooms. Working with vulnerable college populations, I taught words for structures my students could see themselves inside: privilege, marginalization, power, different types of capital, ACEs. The things I had once struggled simply to survive became the things I helped other people understand in the contexts of their own lives. I wasn't leaving those earlier versions of myself behind. I was putting them to good use. I was slowly gathering them into a larger life.

At the same time, Gary and I were building one together. He and I used to say there was a third person in our marriage. Not another partner—the life we were creating between us. Somehow, together, by supporting, protecting, and delighting in each other, we created someone wiser, kinder, and more generous than either of us could have been alone. Most people who knew us knew that third person, even if they didn't have a name for it.

Gary and I eventually accepted that we probably wouldn't become parents. I'd been diagnosed infertile. We still explored reversing his vasectomy, along with assisted reproduction. When we discovered what it would cost, we chose adoption instead. It seemed to us that somewhere there was already a child who needed a family more than we needed a child who shared our DNA. When that path closed too, I grieved motherhood deeply. Eventually, I accepted, again, that chapter of my life wouldn't be written.

And I found peace. The life we had built already felt deeply worth living.

I knew how far I had come.

When I became pregnant—unexpectedly, miraculously—we were living in Belize, during the global pandemic. But it was a very different we.

Gary had suffered strokes and then early-onset dementia, and it took everything about him—his personality, his emotional register, the beautiful mind I had fallen in love with. Looking back now, I can see the first signs had begun before we ever moved to Belize. At the time, none of us understood what we were watching unfold. Gary knew it before any diagnosis. He asked Johnny—our best friend in this new country, the closest friend either of us had made in Belize—to help us. Help me, he asked him. Help Maggie. Johnny said yes. None of us understood what that promise would eventually ask of him.

Belize is an emerging country with healthcare very different than we were used to, flawed as it is, in the US. Care homes, for example, don't really exist there. Home health workers don't really exist there. Social workers for complex medical issues don't really exist there. Even if they had, the country was under severe lockdown orders for a few years during the pandemic, including—especially—healthcare professionals. The borders were closed. We hadn't established the same social network in our time there as what we had left behind, and many friends had left while they could, at the beginning of the pandemic. Survival for us both became such an all-consuming task under such dangerous and traumatic conditions that there was no horizon beyond it.

Illness had transformed our marriage into something neither of us had chosen. Gary was gone, and with him our third person. Johnny and I had become partners, and the baby I was carrying was Johnny's daughter.

That single paragraph explains nothing; it only states facts.

The Loss

Gary was one of those rare people who somehow became larger than life without ever making anyone else feel smaller. He filled a room effortlessly—he didn't demand attention; he delighted in people. He had an astonishing mind. I called him The Oracle, and used to joke that he should go on Jeopardy! and finally make some money from carrying an entire library around in his head. You could ask him almost anything—history, astronomy, theology, philosophy, literature—and there was a good chance he'd know the answer. He could recite literature, scriptures from different faiths, poetry, the Constitution, the Boy Scout creed, all from memory. But he didn't recite facts or deliver conclusions. He put ideas into conversation with one another—and with whoever happened to be sitting at the table. He couldn't help but bring his expansive wealth of knowledge to everything he did, every conversation he entered. But none of that was what made people love him.

Gary loved breaking open ideas—always in service of helping people see differently. He never shied away from using his body to extend his mind's reach. He would break into dance, into song, into mime, dramatic reenactment, or a grandstanding performance if it helped make his point. Or made someone laugh. He had an almost mischievous faith that another question, another story, another way of looking might suddenly reveal something larger than everyone had assumed. One evening he might perform whole scenes of Shakespeare in an exaggerated Southern drawl—his famous Redneck Shakespeare—until everyone was doubled over laughing. Then he might transition seamlessly to how a philosopher's point related to that scene and look through that lens at the politics currently unfolding in the world. He could engage in the most esoteric discussion imaginable, yet somehow everyone in the room felt invited into it. He simply delighted in the life of the mind, and he delighted even more in watching someone else's mind suddenly come alive.

More than anything, though, Gary believed in people.

One day a neighbor quietly told us she was frightened of a new man in the neighborhood because he was from Iraq. (Ours was the house where she felt safe enough to say that.) A few nights later, we saw that man going inside his house. Gary looked at me and said, "Come on. We have to go meet him." I protested. It was late. We weren't invited and had no welcoming gift to offer. We couldn't just knock on a stranger's door like that. Gary was already walking. That evening began another lifelong friendship. Raad had been desperately lonely. Gary had simply figured that what he needed wasn't distance but company.

Another time, when a devastating ice storm left much of Spokane without power for weeks in winter, our house became the place people gathered. We had a fireplace, hot water, and just enough room to keep making more room. Friends came. Neighbors came. Strangers came, and didn't stay as strangers for long. Somehow that was always Gary's way. Strangers became guests. Guests became friends. Friends became family. The children in our lives all claimed him as Uncle, and he loved them right back. They weren't projects. They weren't people he was helping from a distance. They became his people too. Somewhere along the way we stopped needing qualifiers like "chosen" or our favorite, "logical" (as opposed to biological). They were all simply family. Our table just kept getting longer. A refrain we heard often over the years was, "I meet the most interesting people at your house."

People trusted Gary with the hardest parts of their lives. He was the person people called for advice, for help helping someone else, and in crisis. They didn't call because Gary had credentials. They called because they knew he would meet another human being with compassion before judgment, curiosity before certainty, hope before despair.

That was the mind I had fallen in love with. That was the man I had built a marriage with.

Johnny had known that Gary too—the one who welcomed people into his home, who made strangers feel like old friends, who quietly believed in people until they began believing in themselves. They loved one another without reservation. There was never any competition between them because there was never anything to compete over. They were simply two men trying to care for one another and for me inside a reality none of us would ever have chosen.

Gary didn't simply disappear. That would have been heartbreaking enough. He became what I have only ever been able to call the anti-Gary.

Gary had always been larger than life. His kindness was larger than life. His compassion was larger than life. His patience was larger than life. His generosity, curiosity, hospitality, and delight in other people all seemed to exist in extraordinary measure.

Strokes reversed the direction of his character. The magnitude remained.

His immense kindness became immense cruelty. His immense gentleness became immense violence. The same force that had once enlarged everyone around him now overwhelmed them in the opposite way.

Then, without warning, he would come back—not for long, sometimes only for a few minutes, but long enough to look at me and understand what was happening, to recognize that this was my baby and Johnny's, and to choose to bless her anyway. That was Gary. The real Gary.

Johnny stepped closer just as I was breaking apart. He cared for Gary, loved him, endured his anger, soothed his fear, and kept showing up every day for years when there was nothing to receive in return and no telling if Gary was even in there somewhere, aware of anything or not. That faithfulness remains one of the most astonishing things I have ever witnessed. It didn't translate into an easy relationship for Johnny and me. Now we try to do our best for our daughter, across borders, in the ordinary, imperfect work that follows when love can't bear reality.

I don't tell this story because I have arrived at peace with all of it. I tell it because I haven't. I am still learning what it means to love imperfectly, to forgive imperfectly, and to remain truthful without allowing complexity to collapse into simple stories.

Everything was impossibly hard, and one of the hardest parts remains that Gary didn't just disappear, but I lost him in my own mind, heart, and memory. The anti-Gary demanded every part of my attention. I feared him. I came to hate him. My mind, occupied entirely with surviving the person in front of me, could no longer hold the man I had loved alongside him. I could not remember Gary while the anti-Gary was standing there. Not faintly remember—could not, at all, no matter how I tried. I had a husband I would have walked through fire for, and a husband I sometimes wished would simply stop. I could not reconcile them. For a long time, I did not have both versions of him. I had only the one in front of me, and there were days I wasn't sure he had ever been any different, if Gary had ever existed at all.

There was no good choice in any of it, only different ways of being wounded. We were in Belize, in a pandemic, with almost no resources and few options. We had lost all our money in an international bank collapse soon after settling in Belize. More than one person told me, gently and out of real concern for both of us, that I should simply leave him to whatever would come.

I had to stop living with the anti-Gary. I hired caregivers, and the anti-Gary demoralized all of them. Even with overwhelming unemployment during the pandemic and people desperate for work, it was not an easy role to fill, or keep filled. I managed medications, appointments, schedules, crises, and the constant work of trying to keep him safe. I visited often.

Gary himself, in his lucid moments, begged for help to die. That plea didn't begin with illness. For years before the strokes, Gary had thought deeply about the right to die. We had talked about it extensively. He had a plan. He had assembled what he needed should he ever face the kind of future he most feared, and had brought those supplies with us to Belize.

Then, after the strokes, there were moments when he came back to himself just long enough to see the landscape clearly. He recognized what had happened to him. He recognized what had become of us. Whether he experienced those years as witness, participant, prisoner, or something else entirely, I will never know. But in those lucid moments, I believe he could see enough of the anti-Gary to recognize what had become of him. And in that clarity, with heartbreaking precision, he asked for the help he had always hoped would be available if this day ever came.

If he had remained there—lucid, unmistakably Gary—we might have faced that question together. We might have discovered what love, faithfulness, and courage required of us. Or we might have discovered that we couldn't do what either of us hoped. I will never know. He always disappeared again before either of us had the chance.

There was no way through that didn't cost me a piece of myself.

After having come so far, I no longer knew if the person I had become still existed inside any of this.

It wasn't only Gary who had disappeared. Or the me I thought I knew. The third person disappeared too—the one who had welcomed strangers, gathered people around our table, believed there was always room for one more. The one who had given me the grounds from which to be so generous myself.

The ways I had learned to understand my own life no longer seemed to hold. Love. Faithfulness. Identity. Choice. Even the person I believed myself to be. None of those questions disappeared. I just couldn't trust the answers I'd spent years reaching anymore.

And underneath all of that sat a question I had never expected to ask: What is love, if it can become this? I had loved Gary so fiercely that I would have done anything for him—crossed any distance, given up anything, and called it the easiest decision of my life. And now I feared him. Hated him. Couldn't remember him. Didn't really believe, or at least wasn't sure, he had ever really existed. If that was possible—if love that real could come to this, if I could fail him so completely and so callously—then what had I actually understood about love, or about myself, all those years I thought I understood both?

And it was into that exact collapse—not beside it, inside it—that pregnancy arrived, asking me to promise faithfulness to a child when I could no longer say with any confidence what faithfulness meant, or whether I was someone capable of it.

Absence & Accompaniment

The question that had quietly followed me for years—What helps people become more fully themselves?—didn't change. I had to reconsider my answers, and pregnancy made it impossible to ask theoretically any longer. I had become one of the people I was trying to understand.

I expected pregnancy would be one profound threshold among many. I didn't expect it to gather all the others into itself. Every question I had spent years asking returned. Every answer I might give became newly alive. If that had been all pregnancy was asking of me, it would already have been extraordinary.

I was increasingly alone with that grappling. That extended family I'd spent years building was in another country, caught up in their own lives turned upside down, or at least sideways, by the pandemic. In Belize, my pregnancy shocked and scandalized people I had trusted. One threatened me with violence. Johnny's mother (my daughter's own grandmother), instead of offering support, told me the karma for what I had done would deform my baby—while Gary, when he came back to himself, chose to bless that same baby. People who had known me crossed the street rather than meet my eyes. Overnight, the ordinary social fabric that had always held me disappeared.

When I had imagined being pregnant, I had always imagined being held inside the ordinary rituals that tell someone they are not bringing new life alone. Instead I found myself between worlds. The traditions I had grown up expecting weren't there. I wasn't caught by Belizean ones either. There wasn't another circle waiting to gather me in. There was simply nothing. It wasn't that care looked different. It was that there was almost no care at all. I found myself carrying it alone.

And underneath all of it ran something I could barely hold: This was my pregnancy. This was the time when my past and my present were meeting and shaping another human being's entire future—the world she would be born into, the mother she would find waiting for her, the inheritance I would hand her whether I chose to or not. I had spent years asking what kind of inheritance I hoped to leave. Now the question had a heartbeat and a due date. The stakes had never felt more real, and I was carrying them without anyone to help me bear the weight.

I was missing so much more than a baby shower. More than financial security, which had collapsed with the bank. More than even Gary—who I had never imagined being without, even if I had imagined I might one day carry him only in memory. It was that every pillar of my life had collapsed in quick succession. I hadn't had time to sift through the wreckage or rebuild before there was more devastation. That whole trajectory I had worked diligently to shape for decades was undone so easily. Every part of my life that had made me want to bring a baby into it was now reversed. I couldn't help but remember my other, earlier life. I could see the scale of how much I had lost. But there was no time. My daughter was not waiting for me, not waiting for better circumstances.

In Awe

The conversations I most needed to have with another human being became conversations I had to learn to have with myself. In that isolation—trying to survive the anti-Gary, carrying new life, trying to understand what world I was bringing my daughter into and what of myself I was bringing with me—I had no guide. I had to become my own companion because I couldn't find one. I had to learn how to ask myself the kinds of questions another thoughtful person might have asked if they'd been standing beside me.

At the time, I thought I was searching for resources. Looking back, I think I was also searching for at least an echo of the companion I had already lost. Of course there was no replacing Gary, no replacing the third person we had become together. Yet I was still looking for the kind of company that leaves you larger than it found you.

For years, my first reaction to almost anything had been, I need to talk to Gary about this. A new idea. A hard decision. Something funny. Something beautiful. An impossible question. He had a way of accompanying people through impossible questions without taking those questions away from them. By the time I became pregnant, that reflex had disappeared along with him. I couldn't have that thought because I couldn't remember the man I wanted to talk to.

Every complicating factor in my life became a lens. Each one showed me a different place where the existing resources quietly assumed a different person than the one I was. I couldn't have named it that way at the time. I only knew that I kept searching and kept not finding a place where I was welcome—not as I was.

Teaching had taught me to watch how people learn, not simply whether they do. Years of research had taught me that systems are never neutral—every form, every policy, every curriculum quietly imagines a particular human being and, just as quietly, leaves someone else outside its design. Therapy had taught me to become curious about my own mind rather than simply believing every thought that passed through it. Those lessons didn't enter my pregnancy consciously. They simply came with me because they had become part of how I moved through the world.

At first I assumed I simply hadn't found the right resource. Surely someone had already thought deeply about this part of becoming. There had to be books, communities, courses—something—that accompanied the inner life of this threshold with as much seriousness as people devoted to the physical one. Pregnancy is, after all, perhaps the most profound transformation of adult life.

Searching from Belize during the pandemic looked different than it would have from many places. Resources that seemed promising assumed healthcare systems and support services that simply didn't exist where I lived. Some communities required payment methods I couldn't use. Some apps weren't available in Belize. More than once I found something I wanted to try, only to discover I couldn't reach it because I happened to be standing on the wrong side of a border.

The deeper problem was that even when I found thoughtful resources, I rarely found myself inside them. They assumed a pregnancy uncomplicated by caregiving, or by profound grief, or by the ordinary reality that every human being arrives carrying an entire lifetime before they ever become a parent. The particulars of my life were unusual. The experience of arriving at pregnancy already layered, already carrying more than the resources had imagined, was not. And the more I searched, the less convinced I became that this was only my problem.

And underneath that, I began to notice something else—a quieter assumption running through almost everything I found. Pregnancy was being treated as a process of producing a successful outcome. The parent seemed to disappear behind the project. Success meant the right birth, the right choices, the healthy baby at the end. Anything that interrupted that story—a cesarean, complications, grief, loss, an unexpected family, a different path—felt less like another way through pregnancy than like a departure from the one the resource had imagined. Every one of those resources had quietly decided what the point of all of it was. The point was the outcome. The point was the baby. I understood why. But I had just spent over a year discovering, in the hardest way possible, that I could not become a mother worth having without surviving as a person first. The baby mattered. I mattered too. One could never be the price of the other.

For months, I had been asking the wrong question: Where is the right resource? Eventually, almost without noticing, the question changed. What would a companion that actually begins with the human being look like? Not with an ideal pregnancy. Not with assumptions about family, culture, country, finances, or outcome. With the person. Whoever they are. However they arrived here.

I kept looking for someone who would begin with me instead of beginning with the pregnancy. Eventually I understood that what I had been searching for wasn't another authority. It was company that would stay with me regardless of where the story led—and not tell me how it should go.

I also began noticing something about care itself—that it is astonishingly responsive. Not just good care. All care. Even harmful care responds to something. What distinguished the people who helped me most from the people who wounded me wasn't primarily knowledge or kindness, though both mattered. It was what they were responding to. The people who had already decided who I was could no longer really see me. The people who helped me kept responding to me.

I didn't set out to build a course.

I set out to find the conversations I needed and couldn't have.

Over time, those conversations became In Awe.

In Awe doesn't replace the people who accompany us. It tries to be good company when they can't. It takes seriously the thing that has too often been left alone: that you are a full human being in the middle of becoming, and that becoming matters regardless of how the birth story unfolds. A pregnancy that ends in loss is not a pregnancy that didn't matter. The person you were becoming through it did not stop becoming. That work is real. It counts. You count.

Pregnancy ends. The becoming doesn't.

Epilogue

I'm only beginning to have enough distance to tell this story coherently. Not because everything has resolved. It hasn't. But because I'm finally emerging from surviving it into understanding it—or at least being able to see it more clearly.

This is the story of In Awe. If my life hadn't taken such unpredictable turns, if I had remained that earlier me, living my hard-won, satisfying life, I may well have still written In Awe, or its alternate-universe version. But in this universe, this is the version that came to be, that had to be.

Somewhere over the last year, as In Awe took shape from pieces to a more coherent whole, so did my memory of Gary. I wasn't trying to recreate him by committing myself to In Awe. But I do think some of the way he moved through the world found its way into these pages.

And as I've been building this for someone else, it began accompanying me too. Not because it solved my life. Not because grief disappeared or relationships became simple. None of that is true. But because it kept asking me the same questions and inviting the same conversations I had hoped it would one day offer someone else.

It's now been more than a year since Gary died. The trauma of those last, long years is finally beginning to shrink back to its rightful place inside a much larger life. Gary keeps getting bigger. Memory keeps restoring him to me.

Only now is there room to wonder what those years were like for him.

Sometimes memory restores another piece of him.
Before I can stop myself, I think,
I wasn't sure I would ever see you again.
Then it hits me:
There is no one left to hear the welcome.

The work is still working on me.

Postscript

About the name…

As someone who takes words very seriously, I have turned Sacred Transformation over and over in my mind. In spite of my misgivings about connotation, I have yet to find a better way to express its core idea so succinctly:

When you do the work to consciously shape your own becoming, that is sacred.

And ultimately, I don't think becoming is something that's ever finished; I think it keeps inviting us. And whenever we truly witness it—in ourselves or in another person—we stand, almost despite ourselves, in awe.